Category talk:600X

Pentium III Hardware Random Number Generator

Certain Intel Pentium III CPU chipsets provided a hardware random number generator, along with a CPU ID. So I naturally wonder whether my Thinkpad 600x (Pentium III 500 Mhz) has this feature. I was not able to find any discussion of it on the IBM site.

In the BIOS configuration tool (hold down F1 during power on) I see an option to turn on/off the CPU id. So I'm wondering...

Does the 600X have the Intel random number generator?

Does disabling the CPU ID also disable the RNG?

Do current Linux distributions (Debian, Xandros, Ubuntu, Mepis etc) use the RNG to seed /dev/random?

How can I tell if this is working on my (Xandros OCE 2.0.1) Thinkpad 600x?